two days ago, the school told us that we were gonna take a two day trip to a nearby scenic spot to do some hiking, which i thought sounded cool. so yesterday this guy alan, who takes care of foreign teachers and is incredibly nerdy and polite, knocks on our door at 6 am to wake us up and drag us to the riverport.

(a bit about alan: one of the guys from hawaii, jd, has taken to saying vulgar things to alan whenever they interact cause we're never sure if he understands our english; i must have laughed for ten minutes straight when alan handed us copies of the new schedule and jd shouted 'sweet beautiful breasts!' in his face...i said it was vulgar =9)

when we got to the riverport we all got on boats with our students and ended up taking a 3 hour boat ride to this gorge, where we climbed for about 4 hours along the craziest hike ever...it was seriously the most dangerous thing i've ever done in my life. about two full hours of it was spent clinging to chains nailed into the side of the gorge while we dangled above the river at the bottom and under random waterfalls, walking on thing 6-inch wide logs, thin metal ladders, or my favorite, metal spikes nailed into the cliff spaced about 2 feet apart...a lot of the time i was climbing more with my arms than my legs. sometimes we climbed straight up the mountain, using tiny footholds carved into the rock, and i cursed my (relatively) large, ungainly feet.

the most amazing thing was that the chinese kids, even (and especially) my students, who're the youngest, flew along the path. i'm telling you, they're made of freaking rock. when we took breaks along the river at the bottom, some of my kids would catch small crabs with their bare hands and eat them raw. i really don't understand why the chinese army hasn't won a significant war in the past 150 years or so.

i took a buttload of pictures, but unfortunately the coolest ones didn't come out, which i was really pissed about, since i defied death to take them, climbing one-handed. so no one will ever believe how dangerous the hike really was, which sucks. i would pay money to ship a busload of 10 year old american kids here and force them to go through the gorge.

afterwards, we stayed in local farmers' houses which had no electricity, so we slept around 9 pm and woke up before the sun. seriously, the kids are more like bedouins from the gobi desert than chinese schoolchildren. on the way back to the school, we stopped at a town with a lot of small shops and markets, where i bought an old set of small bottles with river scenes somehow painted on the inside, a beautiful hand-dyed batik, and a hand-weaved grass hat, for a total of seven bucks. china rules!

for some reason, half the girls in the summer camp have decided to pick me as their summer crush. i can't pass a group of them without hearing them giggle like schoolgirls (...) and the occasional 'peter i love you, marry me' shouts. jd and chris tell me about how their students sing this song that goes 'i like peter, i don't love peter, i like peter, i don't love peter...'. i dunno why i'm writing this, probably cause my ego has outgrown hunan province. it's intriguing though, since chris and jd are both good looking guys, and authentic white foreigners to boot, and jd can even speak chinese. who knows what goes through the minds of these crazy banshees. i hope i use my mojo for the forces of good and not evil.

speaking of which, i still haven't found other believers yet. i've talked about my faith with a few of my chinese co-teachers, i haven't really gone in depth, but they seem pretty interested. us foreign teachers also had a discussion about religion, thanks to the news about the gay episcopalean bishop. i taught the song making melodies to my class, but they had no idea who the 'king of kings' is, and didn't really understand my explanation. one step at a time, i suppose.